I think he was ready to sew anything into his skin as well if it’d get him through Immigration. That boy’s story was one of the strangest I’d heard; Momo had told it to us one night in the café, first making us promise to keep it to ourselves and not breathe a word to anyone. He had been sworn to secrecy himself by the man who’d introduced them a month earlier. That’s because in our country we’re very suspicious of anyone who’s suffered terrible misfortune; we shrink from them, they’re never welcome anywhere, because a curse is contagious like scabies, everyone knows that.

She picked up the injured child, set him on her back, settled her other boy on the ass and prepared to leave. She stared hard into the nurse’s averted eyes. “Your ambulance mustn’t leave without my son, sir. ” He nodded, smiling. The mother took off her slippers— the very ones that had crushed her little one’s hands—and flung them as far as she could, into the thistles. Brokenhearted, she walked barefoot back to the village. The tragedy occurred a month later, in the blistering heat of August. Since the boy had come back with both hands amputated, his mother hadn’t spoken.

Nuara was the only woman in the café; the child she held in her lap stopped people from talking. Whatever the cost, she wanted to join Suleiman in France. In Poissy, to be precise. She showed us his address on a bit of paper that was so crumpled it was hard to make it out. He was living in a hostel for guest workers, next to some main road or other. She said that the reason he hadn’t sent news all this time was because something bad had happened. She was convinced of it. She suspected her mother-in-law hadn’t told her the truth.